News and events

New iGrid reports:

You can view all the final Intelligent Grid Cluster Reports from the new look Resources and Publications section.

You can download a copy of the Australian Decentralised Energy Roadmapwhich was launched today by Honourable Martin Ferguson, Minister for Resources and Energy; Minister for Tourism. The event will take place in Sydney on the 15 December,to the launch of the report developed by the University of Technology, Sydney. The Roadmap is intended to provide a concise and practical blueprint for accelerating the deployment of distributed energy in the form of energy efficiency, load management, distributed generation and smart metering in Australia. Click here to download the Roadmap

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Control Methodologies

Full titleControl methodologies of distributed generation for enhanced network stability and control

DescriptionThis project anticipates that more and varied sources of power will be introduced to the grid and investigates their potential impacts. It also seeks to develop technology and software packages to manage the introduction of smaller and less constant sources of electricity into the network.

Rapidly evolving energy technology makes it possible to run smaller generators with high efficiency to feed power into the grid. Wind farms are an example, most of the new wind farms being introduced are between 10 and 15 MW capacity compared to a typical coal-powered plants which are several hundred MW capacity.

Many of these new types of generators do not convert primary energy into electricity in a conventional way, like thermal coal plants do. Also, many of them are of considerably smaller in size than conventional thermal or hydro power plants and their power supply is intermittent. For these reasons the few new distributed electricity generators are mostly connected to low and medium voltage grids and not to the high voltage transmission grid.

While these new technologies only provide a small fraction of the system load they have little impact on the behaviour of a power system. However, if the amount of new generation technology introduced in a power system becomes substantial, it the overall behaviour of the system will change. This project will model the level of penetration of new smaller technology and their location and to analyse the future dynamic behaviour of power system.

Research Team:University of Queensland

Expected outcomes:Comprehensive model of the future distributed generation system for power system stability analyses.

A software platform for testing and evaluating new distributed generation technologies regarding system security.

Proper control design to integrate distributed generation with existing large power grid without violating system constraints.

A comprehensive understanding of the security issues of integration of distributed generation in the National Electricity Market (NEM) Grid.

A package of algorithms and software for testing, evaluating and integrating distributed generation in the NEM grid.